I try my hardest to sleep forever, but eventually, my sister sneaks into my room and yanks the blinds up. “Up,” she demands, seizing my wrist and dragging me off the bed, onto the floor.

“Bree, leave me alone. I’m not in the mood,” I grumble. She digs around in the mess on my nightstand until she finds my cell phone, which I make a grab for.

“You have two messages from Ben. Get off your ass, shower, and call him. Then come eat pancakes,” she says.

The last time Bree tried to make pancakes, she made the batter with confectioner’s sugar instead of flour, added stale chocolate chips, and set them on fire. Then she made me eat them anyway, telling me I was being “unappreciative of her hard work.” I think it’s fair of me to scramble to my feet and flee to the bathroom.

“I didn’t make them!” she calls after me. “Asshole!”

I expect the heat of the shower to ease some of my tension, but it doesn’t. It just suffocates me, burns me, highlights every inch of my skin that Garen touched last night. Please, God, don’t let Ben find out from Garen. Let this all go away.

But apparently God isn’t listening, because when I leave the bathroom with nothing but a towel slung low around my hips, I find myself face to face with Garen. His eyes scrape across my skin, and he sucks in a ragged breath. After a few awkward seconds, he pointedly shifts his gaze to the ceiling and says in a strangled voice, “Good morning.”

“Hi,” I say dully. “So, did you call Ben the second I left your room last night, or are you planning to fill him in today?”

His eyes drop back to mine, but his face is suddenly bare of any of the accusation or resentment I’d been expecting. He even seems like he might be genuinely confused when he says, “What are you talking about?”

“The kiss last night. I know you’re probably planning to tell Ben, because apparently it’s impossible for me to have a normal, happy relationship without something huge screwing it up. And I’d rather be the one to tell him, thanks, so if you don’t mind, I—”

“Travis,” Garen interrupts, “have you completely lost your goddamn mind? I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

I blink, but he doesn’t seem to be joking. Did I hallucinate what happened last night? Was it a dream? “You kissed me last night,” I say uncertainly. “And I kissed you back.”

He laughs, still seeming pretty bewildered. “I’m pretty sure I’d remember if I made out with anybody last night. You’ve got to stop this wake-and-bake shit, man.”

I open my mouth to reply, but he edges past me into the bathroom and shuts the door with a click.

What the fuck just happened?

I stop by my bedroom to throw on some clothes, and am still in the process of pulling on my t-shirt when I get down to the kitchen. “Did Garen hit his head really, really hard this morning? Maybe he fell out of bed and into a ravine full of incredibly sharp rocks or something?”

Bree frowns around a mouthful of pancakes, and James pauses with a measuring cup of batter poised above the sizzling pan. “What do you mean?” he asks.

“He… okay, Garen kissed me last night—”

“Travis!” Bree groans.

“—and I kissed him back—”

“Completely understandable,” James murmurs, and Bree seems unable to stop herself from humming her agreement.

“—okay, can you two please shut up for a minute?” I say irritably. “As I was saying… we kissed last night, and I just ran into him after my shower—”

“This story is going to end in a blowjob,” James says sagely to Bree. I grab one of the pancakes off my sister’s plate and throw it at him.

“Shut up, James. I just ran into him, and I was wearing nothing but a towel, and… nothing happened.”

Bree snorts. “That was probably the most anticlimactic story I’ve ever heard.”

“No, I mean, that’s what he told me. He says nothing happened last night. Not as in, ‘It meant nothing.’ As in, he says he has no idea what I’m talking about. He says we didn’t kiss, even though we did. And he seems to actually believe it.”

Bree makes a little noise of confusion and cocks her head to the side. James, however, goes rigid. “Let me guess. He said something condescending like, ‘I’d know if I did something like that. Are you on drugs?’”

“Yeah,” I say slowly. “Why, does this happen often?”

He shrugs gently, looking uncomfortable. “It used to, when we were in school together. It’s a game he plays.”

My body starts to get cold from the inside out, like my internal organs are on ice. “What do you mean?”

“He’ll hook up with a guy, then deny it the next day to mess with his mind. He’ll say he doesn’t know what the guy’s talking about, it never happened, he was hallucinating, whatever. And then eventually, when he gets bored with that, he’ll finally agree it happened, but in a way that’ll make the guy wish it hadn’t. He’ll say things like, ‘Can you blame me for forgetting? It’s not like it was any good.’ Or he’ll say he must’ve been drunk when it happened, because no way would he hook up with that guy sober. He… really only does it when something’s bothering him, or when someone else has hurt him. Garen can be very Old Testament sometimes, ‘an eye for an eye’ and all that. He’s just not too picky about whose eye he gets.”

“So, I hurt him by not waiting for him, and now he’s trying to get back at me by pretending he never kissed me anyway? That’s… actually pretty convenient for me,” I admit. James shakes his head.

“Listen, you don’t know Garen like I do. I’m sure he was a great person while he was here, and I’m sure it was pretty genuine, but Lord is there darkness in that boy, and I don’t think he ever let you see it. He was fairly normal when I met him, more of a prankster than anything else. And he got better again, right before he left for this shithole town. But you have to believe me when I say that Dave poisoned him, and there were a few years in the middle there where he was twisted beyond all belief.”

He pauses and surveys me as though he’s trying to decide how much more he should say. I don’t move, and eventually, he continues, “He told me some about you, Travis. I know you’ve had some problems, and you’ve been to some bad places. But it’s not the same. If you’re a bad storm, he’s a damn hurricane. There are places he goes in his mind that even I don’t know how to bring him back from. There are times, when he’s upset and angry, when the only way he can stop himself from feeling pain is by causing pain. He will fix himself by hurting other people, by destroying them, and sometimes, I swear he can be downright evil. But then he’ll get better, and he’ll feel guilty. He makes his amends, he undoes as much of the damage as he can, and everyone forgives him because we know he has a good heart. It’s just that when someone tries to break that heart, it turns stone cold for a while.”

“Travis fucking McCall, did you seriously need to use all the hot water?”

We all jump as Garen, wearing just a pair of jeans and his combat boots, saunters back into the kitchen, rubbing his hair dry with a towel.

“Garen fucking Anderson, did you seriously need to come downstairs half-naked? I’m eating here, and you’re practically my brother now,” Bree says, making a face at him. Garen plants a kiss on the top of her head, then rounds the table to press his lips to my cheek. He catches James last, a lingering brush of mouth across mouth.

“So, while I was showering, I was thinking,” he announces.

“About me?” James suggests.

Garen responds by making an obscene gesture in front of his crotch. “Of course. But seriously, I was thinking, and I’ve decided we should have a party. I think it would be a disgrace to our age if we didn’t take advantage of having this place to ourselves.”

“This is true,” James says, considering. “And we could get a pretty big crowd, considering we cover two different schools.”

“And I’m assuming that you know enough girls to balance out our friends from Patton. A lot of people stay there over spring break, so most of our friends could just take the train in, then get a few cabs here. If each of us just invited fifteen people, this place would still be mostly full,” Garen adds.

And then the phones come out, all three of them texting everyone they’ve decided to have over tonight. Am I the only one who cares about the big speech James just gave us? I can’t invite my boyfriend into this house if there’s even a chance that Garen will try to screw things up. I clear my throat. “Garen? Are you going to—”

“Should I invite Liam?” Garen cuts me off, glancing up from the contact list in his phone.

“Liam’s alright,” James says. “He might not want to come, though. I don’t think he really gets along with most of the people who we hang out, so there wouldn’t be much of a point. And he and Jason keep beating the shit out of each other, because Liam fucked Jason’s girlfriend. Unless you want to have somebody call the cops, I’d say pick one or the other.”

“Okay, aside from the fights, Liam’s pretty easy-going, though, so he could probably talk to some Lakewood or Kandinsky people. Plus, he gives better blowjobs than Jason,” Garen points out. Bree looks up from her contacts list, frowning at him, then at James.

“To be completely honest, I don’t understand that at all,” she says.

Garen cocks his head to the side. “Don’t understand what?”

“How the gay guys I know can possibly have more active sex lives than any of the straight people I know. It was enough of a weird coincidence that my brother and my stepbrother turned out to be gay. But Garen slept with Ben, who sometimes makes out with Alex but is now dating Travis. And now, Garen, you’re basically telling me your old roommate was gay, as are all your friends from school. How is this even possible?” Bree demands.

“Well, first of all,” James says, “I’m bisexual. I’m just as attracted to women as I am to men, but I’ve had more relationships with men because I happen to know more men, since I go to an all-male school.”

“Second of all, not all of our friends are gay. We hang out with plenty of guys who would never even think of hooking up with another guy. And a lot of the guys we do hook up with aren’t really gay either, per se. Some are bisexual, some are experimenting, and some just get really, really trashed. Everything’s kind of… skewed, I guess, when you live in the environment we’ve been in. Part of it’s the fact that, after all these years, we’re all a little too comfortable with each other, so the boundaries aren’t the same,” Garen says.

James shrugs. “Besides, rumors fly fast around boarding school. I became notorious pretty early in freshman year, and once people heard that there was a guy who was extremely willing to hook up with people—”

“—especially a guy who’s as hot as Jamie—”

“—yes, that too. Once they heard about me, a lot of the guys who knew they were gay, but hadn’t really been hooking up with anyone, decided they would seek me out.”

“Same with me,” Garen adds, “but that started later. We also share guys. You know, I’ll sleep with someone and let Jamie know if he’s any good, and he’ll do the same for me. That’s kind of how it worked with Lakewood, too. Obviously Ev didn’t go up to my dad and say, ‘Hey, I think my son’s as much of a fag as yours, we should date.’ But I’m pretty sure the only reason Ben decided to talk to me was because he thought I was hot. If he was straight, he would’ve just stuck to his own group of friends. And if I had been straight, I probably wouldn’t have made the effort to hang out with him outside of school, or text him as often, or go to parties where I knew he’d be.”

“So, following your logic,” I say slowly, “Alex only made out with Ben because he knew Ben is gay, and therefore he knew that the odds of rejection would be low, explaining why he’s never tried it with a straight guy, like Mason or Jeremy. And I only hooked up with Alex because I knew he had already made out with a guy before.”

“Yeah. Just like how you only got with Ben because I got with him first, which enlightened you to the fact that he was… wait, what? When the fuck did you hook up with Alex?” he says sharply.

Oh, fuck. Things like this are why I need a chart, so that I don’t become buried under my own horrible, incestuous drama. Shifting slightly, I admit, “Valentine’s Day. About a month after you left, I guess. The week before Ben and I got together.”

“What did you do with him?” Garen says. I can’t tell if he realizes that he has taken a few small steps towards me, but I am uncomfortably aware of it.

“We just hooked up.”

“No,” Garen says flatly. “No, I mean, what exactly happened?”

Fuck you, I want to say. He has no right to be asking me this, or looking so pissed off.. But the words come out without me having to try that hard to summon them. “He and I got wasted at this party he was having at his house, and we ended up making out in his basement. We went up to his room and he started sucking me off.”

“What else?” Garen says, and I finally realize he hasn’t blinked once in at least a minute.

“It didn’t feel right. It was only happening for about a minute before I told him to stop, and I went home,” I say. He doesn’t reply. We stare at each other for ages, and just when I begin to wonder if he’s going to hit me, James clears his throat.

“Garen,” he says, and Garen suddenly transforms, shooting him a lazy grin and returning to his cell phone.

“So, since it turns out that Alex must’ve been bullshitting us with all those protests about how he’s really straight, he just makes stupid choices when he’s drunk, we should definitely invite him. I’d be pretty interested in seeing how good he is at giving head if I let him do it for longer than a minute,” he says. The change in his demeanor is so sudden that I find myself backing away.

“Yeah,” I say finally. “We should invite him.”

When I am sure that Garen has returned to inviting his own friends, I pull out my phone and send a text to Alex’s number. Having a party tonight, you should come. Garen’s back. He wants you here too, but he’s acting weird. If he asks you to hook up, be careful.

I only have to wait a few minutes for the reply.

gonna be driving 2nite, wont be drinking. a sober alex is a straight alex, so no worries about hooking up w/ g. just remember to take ur own advice. & if u hurt ben, i’ll fucking kill u.

I blink down at the screen, baffled as always at Alex’s ability to see exactly what I wish he couldn’t. I hit ‘reply’ and type, Same here: no worries about hooking up w/ G.

“I’m… going to go call Ben,” I say.

“Tell him I say hi,” Garen calls after me as I escape to the front porch.

Ben answers on the first ring. “Do you have any idea why Alex is texting me with a promise not to get drunk and embarrass himself tonight?”

I laugh softly. “That’s actually what I’m calling you about. We’re having a party tonight, which I obviously want you to come to. Do you have plans?”

“I do now. How are things over there?” he asks. I don’t need to think that hard to figure out that he’s really asking if I’m about to break up with him. I force down the memories of last night – my promises to Ben, my mistakes with Garen – and try to sound normal.

“Awkward, as would be expected. And Garen seems like he’s kind of going off the deep end, and may or may not be planning to seduce Alex. Hence me texting him with a heads-up, and Alex deciding not to drink tonight,” I say. Partly because it sounds good, but mostly because it’s true, I add, “I miss you.”

“You saw me yesterday,” Ben says, sounding amused. Maybe all I mean is, I miss you being the last person I kissed.

“I know. I’m still glad I get to see you tonight, though,” I say.

“Me too. Listen, I have to go, one of my sisters is about to burn down our house with the toaster. I’ll talk to you later. Love you.”

“I love you, too,” I say.

I sit there for several minutes, listening to the silence of the ended call and trying to figure out if “I love you” means the same thing as “I love you more than I love him.”